My Wife is a High School Girl

Synopsis

Onohara Asami is a 17 year old girl attending high school. What no one else knows, however, is that she's married ... to her physics teacher. Naturally, this must be kept a secret from everyone, which is hard enough. Also, teacher Ichimaru has signed a contract where he has promised not to sleep with his wife until she has graduated, so to please his wife's somewhat irrationally angry father.

Review

Going by the title of this show, I pretty much thought I had another hate object on my hands. Just the TITLE of the show seemed pretty much like a harbinger of doom, even though the subject of the show -- the marriage between people with a somewhat large difference in age -- has been touched on before, more or less.

Judging anime characters by age can sometimes be hard, though the show clearly tells us that Asami is 17 and her teacher husband is 25. While one might think that 8 years of difference might be a tad too much, I don't seem to remember anyone making a big deal about that in Please Teacher, so it should be no more of a problem here, even if the genders are reversed. Right?

In a sense, My Wife is a High School Girl could have become a rather interesting show, if it had only dealt with the taboo itself. Instead, it seems to be satisfied with just assuming this sort of thing is somewhat of a normal situation, and Asami and her husband is just trying to save themselves the embarrassment. (This is understandable, seeing as privacy rarely is an option if you go by certain dating game anime.) Still, one might have expected this show to feature some element of the difficulties a marriage between not only two people with a bit of a gap in age difference, but also in the situation of a teacher/student relationship. And not only in regard to the surrounding populace, but also between themselves.

Sadly, My Wife is a High School Girl seems to be content delivering the same old comedy routines, never really straying far off course or risking anything on bringing up socially objectionable contents. So, instead of having the main characters discussing or living the roles of two people who've taken a giant leap of chance, we mostly see Asami and Kyosuke attend school and going about their day, occasionally sprinkled with aforementioned comedy. It might be "cute", but it's also somewhat boring to just watch Asami mill around school during day and spend her afternoon preparing dinner for her husband who always seems to work overtime and come home late. (Which, if the "I am a Japanese schoolteacher" websites are anything to go by, isn't far from the truth.)

And that's Asami in a nutshell. She may go to school, and I can only assume she does rather well. At home, however, she's domestic to the extreme. I'm serious... she spends just about all her spare time cooking, shopping and waiting for her husband to come home to her, so she can spend her time in his company. (Which, given all the overtime he puts in, becomes somewhat of a rarity.) Of course, when they DO get to spend time together, they get interrupted by Asami's father, who doesn't really approve of her choice in a husband, and plans to make his life a living hell, at least if he breaches the contract they made.

Even for a dating game anime, My Wife is a High School Girl shoots itself in the foot, simply because any tension that might have happened when other women starts going for the male lead isn't there, just because.... well, he's already married, and quite happily so. Which means that you know you'll be in for a lot of awkward situations that doesn't really go anywhere, save for a rather bad attempt at creating humor. In light of the two characters appearing in episode 3, this is especially obvious, and just becomes a huge embarrassment to watch.

At least My Wife is a High School Girl is a rather pleasant show to look at most of the time. The art is quite nice, actually, and the characters looks more like normal human beings instead of featuring ridiculous babeage as found in DearS, or the ribbon mania you can see in titles like Memories off, heavily exaggerated in the name of cute. One might think that the occasional fanservice isn't doing the show any favors, but it wasn't featured enough to bother me all that much.

Unfortunately, the show itself is just too boring to be of any particular value. The taboo of marrying a high school girl isn't really talked about all that much, nor is the problems of being a student of your husband and the problems that are bound to exist because of that. It's just a normal family bliss show with nothing in particular to offer aside from some moderate fanservice. I don't really hate this show, as it IS a little bit touching on rare occasions. Still, I don't really think I can give this show my recommendation. It simply doesn't have enough to offer.